Review: Fashion Dreamer Isn’t Very Style Savvy

Everything about Fashion Dreamer ahead of launch offered the hope that this could be a Style Savvy successor for Switch owners to enjoy. While it is a dress-up game with an admirable array of options, it also feels more barren and lifeless than Syn Sophia’s other series.

While Style Savvy saw players running a shop, getting more involved in clothing customization, doing more to meet specific genre, element, and design needs for other people, Fashion Dreamer strips that back for this entirely new Switch experience. Instead, players craft a Muse. This avatar explores rather empty streets in a metaverse-like virtual world, with four hubs known as Cocoons each offering their own vibe. There’s no shop. The clothing items are more limited. The other Muses’ requests are less restrictive. There are no competitions at launch. There’s no goal beyond “more notoriety.” 

This means the gameplay loop doesn’t provide the sort of feedback you’d expect. Especially if you play offline, rather than online. You wander around and find Muses based on NPC or other players’ data. They’ll mention a specific request, which could be a type of clothing, a certain color, or specific patterns. You can fulfill that request by creating a Lookit outfit that meets some of those… or not. Either way, you’ll get some points you can use to create new clothing items from your catalog. You also will get keys to unlock clothing design catalog items, Lucky Coins for photo items, Gacha Tickets for the Hope, Act, Fun, and Love Cocoon gacha machines with clothing item templates, or Bingo Tickets for the three or five-line Bingo minigames that earn you more points. 

The goal eventually ends up accruing as many points as possible so you can create more unique clothing items, which will hopefully get noticed by other players and “liked” so you can get more points to create new clothing items. You also are creating those pieces so you can level up what is essentially an in-game pass to more unique pieces of clothing aside from ones earned in the gacha or unlocked by hitting new Influencer tiers.

So my first problem is that the clothing design templates aren’t all that unique, interesting, or customizable. I was excited about a lot of the Cocoon gacha items for each area, until I realized ones from places like Hope, Fun, and Love also appeared in the standard “library” you unlock with keys and sometimes even in the ones you acquire as you “level up” your proficiency. When it comes to changing their style, many of them only offer one or two segments you can change. That is, until you get past the first 30 or so “levels” of designing, at which point you’ll see reruns of items that now are mix-and-match and let you change the colors of sleeves, collars, pockets, and so on. For a game with such a limited library, there’s a lot of repetition in the shirt, pant, skirt, jacket, dress, and shoe section. Not to mention it is a step back from Style Savvy in many ways, due to the omission of items like necklaces and purses.

I was also incredibly disheartened to see there even is an in-game gacha. Especially since the odds are so low. I felt like I had a better rate of getting a five-star in Genshin Impact than I did of getting the “best” dress or top in Cocoon Act or Love. (For the record, I did manage to get the Cocoon Love gothic lolita plaid top after 90 pulls… but that was the only “good” rare I acquired.) Given the nature of the game, it should and could have been more generous about doling those out.

Speaking of generous, Fashion Designer isn’t if it comes to offline play! The best way to get the points needed to create original pieces of clothing is to create a full outfit, set it up on yourself, an NPC Muse, or on a mannequin in your Showroom, and hope other players liked the whole outfit so you’d get 100,000 points. (Though the 20,000 points you get for your original single-pieces isn’t bad either.) It got to the point that since I didn’t care for some of the unlockable clothing patterns, I’d dump my points into color variants of the items that cost over 120,000 points in the item creation area to make to more quickly level up and unlock things, then rely on certain “complete” outfits I’d made for male and female body types to get likes from other players. 

I also feel like fatigue sets in quite quickly in Fashion Dreamer, especially compared to Style Savvy. The different brands in the Syn Sophia DS and 3DS games felt so distinct and unique. Here, it’s much more difficult to gauge what pieces may be considered active, casual, cool, cute, elegant, or unique. I swear that one of my most garish male designs (a lime-green ensemble that included the black neon palm tree shirt, green and black polka dot shorts, a green and black vest, green and black sneakers, green socks, and sunglasses) ended up satisfying request for active, casual, cool, and cute outfits. There’s only so many times you can create these Lookit Muse outfits for characters, especially since the NPCs have very little personality to them, and other players’ with such minimal restrictions and feedback. Once I decided I stopped caring about the gacha items, due to seeing them repeated in the standard catalog, picked up some of the more unique items from other players’ Muses, and hit 100,000 followers, I felt like I’d more than seen it all.

It also didn’t help that once you do find the items you like and want, either by creating them on your own or finding them from someone else, there’s no real motivation to keep using them. The Showroom is more a means of getting Likes than really showing off or setting a theme to entice people to stop by. There’s no guarantee anyone else will see your outfits. There are no competitions at launch, so you can’t see if you’re hitting certain points successfully. Plus since there are such loose restrictions and no more defined qualities as in Style Savvy, it feels like you “win” no matter what you do.

Fashion Dreamer is a very hollow and basic dress-up and fashion game for the Switch, and the best thing that came out of it is it convinced me to go back to Style Savvy Trendsetters and Styling Star on the 3DS. Maybe after the free updates in December 2023 and January 2024, it will feel like there’s more of a reason to play. I’m just so disheartened at how little there is here.

Fashion Dreamer is available for the Nintendo Switch.